The tongue scraper is an Indian invention and other learnings from the ‘Tabiyat’ exhibition

A blow-up from photographer Gauri Gill's Birth Series (2005) showing a midwife assisting in the delivery of her grandchild takes centre stage in Tabiyat: Medicine and Healing in India, a newly-opened exhibition at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai. The photograph, taken in the remote Motasar village of Rajasthan, documents childbirth in a pit on the sandy floors of the midwife's own house—it freezes the moment the umbilical cord is cut. Later, the umbilical cord will be buried in the pit, covered with sand, and the family will go about their day as usual. Despite being cautioned by social workers in the area, Kasumbhi Dai and her daughter decided to deliver the child the same way the previous four had been delivered, with the same matter-of-factness that accompanies illness and death in these parts.

Gill's photograph is as much a postcard of stark reality as it is an indicator of everyday medical knowledge disguised as tradition. Tabiyat, the first leg of a multi-city project across India by the Wellcome Collection—one of UK's most innovative cultural venues, part of the Wellcome Trust, a global health charitable foundation—attempts to draw our attention to these concerns.

In South Asia, ‘Tabiyat' is the common word for both physical and psychological health—it indicates overall, perhaps even spiritual, wellbeing. Traditional midwives, bonesetters, faith healers and heart surgeons all sustain tabiyat through radically different practices. Divided into four broad categories—The Home, The Shrine, The Street and The Clinic—the exhibition brings together an array of antiquities and contemporary material culture concerned with sustaining human health from medicinal plants (neem and tulsi of course, but also Butterfly Pea and Indian Pennywort) to specially-commissioned decorative wrestling clubs from Benares.

Produced in collaboration with CSMVS, Mumbai, with the support of the British Council, the strength of the exhibition lies in the range of its close to 100 exhibits ranging from Tibetan frescoes to colour plates from ancient Ayurvedic manuscripts and Raja Ravi Verma chromolithographs. The historical spine of the exhibition comes from the Wellcome Collection's permanent collection, including works like the Ayurvedic Man (circa 18th century, possibly of Nepali origin), the only known historical illustration of the interior of the human body as understood in Ayurveda. Notable loans include a patachitra scroll on female foetidice from the Devi Art Foundation and a ‘raktabahuli' or healing blood doll that has been in the family of a Dharavi-based compounder for generations. There are also a range of overlooked, everyday objects of medical use such as an eighteenth-century brass enema syringe and a copper tongue scraper—which, one learns at the exhibition, was an Indian invention to remove “ama” or the toxic byproduct of “poor digestive fire” according to Ayurveda.

In curatorial dialogue with Tabiyat is the exhibition opening at Akar Prakar in Kolkata on 18 January. Jeevanchakra, curated by Latika Gupta, will explore the life cycle of the human body and its contact with medical practice. Apart from more photographs from Gill's Birth Series, it will have video, paintings and multimedia installations by leading contemporary Indian artists, namely Nilima Sheikh, Sheba Chhachhi, Mithu Sen, Sonia Khurana, Arpita Singh, Srinivasa Prasad, Gargi Raina, Sooni Taraporewala and Paula Sengupta. The third and final leg of the project in Delhi will include workshops and performances at the British Council by BLOT! on 22 January. A number of public outreach programmes will run in conjunction to the exhibition in Mumbai as well.

While there is little in the show that might be a big revelation (except the Indian origins of the tongue cleaner!), it is a starting point for a more in-depth survey of the breadth of Indian medical science. But with an exhibition of this nature, the subject is always bigger than the exhibition, shares Ratan Vaswani, the London-based curator of the show. To streamline his focus, Vaswani shares that he limited the exhibition to practices that have an analytical core. It doesn't cover faith healing, and homeopathy, due to its German origins, has been omitted as well. An important focus, Vaswani points out, was to dissociate Ayurveda from its religious connotations and present its scientific core.

Perhaps what best encompasses the spirit of the show is an exhibit in the ‘The Home' section—a late 18th century board game of Jnana Bagi (Game of Heaven & Hell) that seems an early predecessor of Snakes and Ladders. In this work, from the permanent collection of the Wellcome Library, the ladders that bring you down are diseases. Sickness and health were once parlour talk in India. This exhibition is a reminder of that.